Betting on Consciousness

Interesting. “Decades-long bet on consciousness ends — and it’s philosopher 1, neuroscientist 0“:

The findings from one of the experiments — which involved several researchers, including Koch and Chalmers — were revealed on Friday at the ASSC meeting. It tested two of the leading hypotheses: integrated information theory (IIT) and global network workspace theory (GNWT). IIT proposes that consciousness is a ‘structure’ in the brain formed by a specific type of neuronal connectivity that is active for as long as a certain experience, such as looking at an image, is occurring. This structure is thought to be found in the posterior cortex, at the back of the brain. GNWT, by contrast, suggests that consciousness arises when information is broadcast to areas of the brain through an interconnected network. The transmission, according to the theory, happens at the beginning and end of an experience and involves the prefrontal cortex, at the front of the brain.

Six independent laboratories conducted the adversarial experiment, following a preregistered protocol and using various complementary methods to measure brain activity. The results — which haven’t yet been peer reviewed — didn’t perfectly match either of the theories.

“This tells us that both theories need to be revised,” says Lucia Melloni, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, Germany, and one of the researchers involved. But “the extent of that revision is slightly different for each theory”.

Of course they’re not going to “find” consciousness in the brain, much less understand how it’s produced, because consciousness is wholly separate from the physical matter of the brain, and separate from the things the brain could produce and organize, like the “network.” Trying to determine where in the brain consciousness emerges is akin to figuring out which part of the car produces the driver: even if you locate the part, that doesn’t indicate the driver is part of the car, only that he is present in a certain part.

I’ll go one step further: “consciousness” doesn’t really exist in the way the sciences and philosophies propose it does. It’s more of a state of existence that language reified from a concept into a perceivable object. Our “souls” or “spirit”—the part of us that exists eternally, that can exist without the body (the “driver” in the car analogy)—inhabits and uses the mind in ways we can’t understand. Because of the fall, the soul is tethered to the body in some manner—think of the “silver cord” from Ecclesiastes 12. Though the soul exists independently and outside of body, we can’t perceive it as such…again, because of the fall. The “consciousness” part is the state of the soul as it’s piloting the body. We might think it’s located in the brain because we understand the brain does a ton of essential, complex things, but that’s merely noting the driver needs to be in the driver’s seat for the car to be properly driven. Mechanistic determinations about the car’s behavior can’t say anything meaningful about the driver himself other than he exists.

All of this explanation is theory and up for grabs. We’re talking the supernatural domain here, so language can only symbolize at the most superficial level what’s going on. To make matters worse, English and Western philosophy are rather bad at helping us understand the supernatural in the first place.